Here’s Rick Brookhiser in the New York Observer:
Terry Teachout has a lively arts blog called “About Last Night” (www.terryteachout.com), in which he reviews the passing scene and his own life. When he is not doing these things, he urges artists and other readers to get with the Internet age. We are slow learners, so he can sound like the sergeant-major barking orders at the native levies. But since he is always interesting and often right, these exhortations to obey our online overlords are worth reading, too.
Mr. Teachout linked a speech by Rupert Murdoch to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on the future of daily newspapers. Mr. Murdoch owns more newspapers than you do, so his opinions on the medium are not an idle thumb-suck….As I read it, Rupert Murdoch was being polite. What he was telling his colleagues was: Newspapers are dead.
Newspapers were more than the particular paper you read. They were part of the dawn, with toothpaste, coffee and trying to find the right sock. You got a rape and a war, weather and box scores, James Reston or Jimmy Breslin. If you read The Times, you got “Reports From Greenland Are Unclear.” If you read the tabs, you got “RIPS OUT HEART, STOMPS ON IT.” Now that’s all gone. Now, three or six times a day, you get Glenn and Jonah and Mickey and Andrew and Drudge and Debka. You get Page 3 and hyper-Catholics, Bush Lied and Iraq the Model, hobbits in prehistoric Indonesia and elephants who foresaw the tsunami. You definitely do not get Thomas L. Friedman. If you need to, you can check a line in Blackstone’s Commentaries or The Duke of Earl. It’s like channel surfing, only there are thousands more channels and you spend even less time on any of them. It all takes 15 minutes, and after a meal or a trip to the water cooler, you do it all again….
Read the whole thing here. Then go here for Jay Rosen’s up-to-the-minute survey of the “instant literature” on the mainstream media’s “big digital migration.” It’s a must.
Remember how things feel right this minute. You’re watching a revolution in progress.